Add Joe Biden to the list of prominent Democrats who’ve had to “revise” the claim that they’ve been shot at in a war zone. (Or, better, add the claim that he’s been shot at to the list of things Biden has said about himself that turn out to, er, need revising.)

At the Dems’ CNN/YouTube debate, Biden began began one of his characteristic bloviations by chiding the Bush administration, “Let’s start telling the truth.” That’s the Revision Squad’s cue to get on red alert. He proceeded to discuss Iraq’s Green Zone: “You better have helicopters ready to take those 3,000 civilians inside the Green Zone, where I have been seven times and shot at.“ (Emphasis added.)

Well, not exactly. Last month the Hill reported that, when pressed, Biden had to concede that he wasn’t sure he’d actually been shot at … just that there were three occasions — only one of which, it turns out, happened in the Green Zone – when “he felt that he was shot at or might have been shot at.” Thinking about the Green Zone incident now, he told the paper, a more accurate comment would have been: “I was near where a shot landed.”

An even more accurate comment would have been that he was in Iraq while a war was going on. As he now recalled it, he and another senator were shaving inside a Green Zone building when a “shot” was fired outside that caused no danger to anyone inside. Indeed, Biden’s staff later revised the revision to say that the “shot” had really been mortar fire “a few hundred yards away” which “rattled the building” where Biden was getting ready for the day.

Biden just can’t help himself. And it’s bizarre since the two other incidents he described, assuming they happened the way he says they happened, sound plenty scary enough — there was no reason to exaggerate or to misstate them as having involved the Green Zone. Evidently, they involved air travel. Once, Biden says, a bullet narrowly missed a helicopter he was flying in (enroute to Baghdad from the Green Zone). Another time, Biden was riding in a C-130 when the plane’s anti-missile system activated, indicating that they may have been fired on by surface to air missiles — though, when pressed, Biden does not offer any description of actually coming under fire.

A Biden staffer concluded: “The nuance of being shot at or shot near means nothing in a war zone. The point Sen. Biden was making is that Iraq is a dangerous place — for our troops, for Iraqis, for everyone.”

The nuance of being shot at or shot near?

In any event, Biden wants us inexperienced rubes to know that “Iraq is a dangerous place.” You can see why Obama would want such a font of foreign-policy wisdom by his side.